Rotary Mechanical

Great article over on Designboom which looks at adding a mechanical old style telephone mechanism over a modern smartphone electronics. Very steampunk.

It's an odd thing about such things, the designer in me hates it, but the artist in me loves it. But there is something deeper here. steampunk for me is like science fiction, in that it really isn't about the past or the future, but about the present, and our relationship to it being examined in a way that allows us to be creative. The rotary dialler and its mechanism attempts to put more life back into our everyday objects, life that has been smoothed away by a homogenised smartphone screen.

There is an even darker side about steampunk to me, in that we might be looking into our future, our post-apocalyptic future, where we cobble together the remaining bits of technology to make our day-to-day objects.

Anyway, to cheer us up here are some more photos, but for more you will have to go over to Designboom and read the story there.